Chapter II: Early Public Life (3)

To Mrs. Coleridge the nursing and sewing only would have belonged; the rest I took upon myself, and since our resolution have been learning the practice. With only two rooms and two people--their wants severely simple--no great labour can there be in their waiting upon themselves. Our washing we should put out. I should have devoted my whole head, heart, and body to my acre and a half of garden land, and my evenings to literature. Mr. and Mrs. Estlin approved, admired, and applauded the scheme, and thought it not only highly virtuous, but highly prudent. In the course of a year and a half, I doubt not that I should feel myself independent, for my bodily strength would have increased, and I should have been weaned from animal food, so as never to touch it but once a week; and there can be no shadow of a doubt that an acre and a half of land, divided properly, and managed properly, would maintain a small family in _everything_ but clothes and rent. What had I to ask of my friends? Not money; for a temporary relief of my want is nothing, removes no gnawing of anxiety, and debases the dignity of man. Not their interest. What could their interest (supposing they had any) do for me? I can accept no place in state, church, or dissenting meeting. Nothing remains possible but a school, or writer to a newspaper, or my present plan. I could not love the man who advised me to keep a school, or write for a newspaper. He must have a hard heart. What then could I ask of my friends? What of Mr. Wade? Nothing. What of Mr. Cottle? Nothing.... What of Thomas Poole? O! a great deal. Instruction, daily advice, society--everything necessary to my feelings and the realization of my innocent independence. You know it would be impossible for me to learn _everything_ myself. To pass across my garden once or twice a day, for five minutes, to set me right, and cheer me with the sight of a friend’s face, would be more to me than hundreds. Your letter was not a kind one. One week only and I must leave my house, and yet in one week you advise me to alter the plan which I had been three months framing, and in which you must have known by the letters I wrote you, during my illness, that I was interested even to an excess and violence of Hope. And to abandon this plan for darkness and a renewal of anxieties which might be fatal to me! Not one word have you mentioned how I am to live, or even exist, supposing I were to go to Acton. Surely, surely, you do not advise me to lean with the whole weight of my necessities on the Press? Ghosts indeed! I should be haunted with ghosts enough--the ghosts of Otway and Chatterton, and the phantasms of a wife broken-hearted, and a hunger-bitten baby! O Thomas Poole! Thomas Poole! if you did but know what a Father and a Husband must feel who toils with his brain for uncertain bread! I dare not think of it. The evil face of Frenzy looks at me. The husbandman puts his seed in the ground, and the goodness, power, and wisdom of God have pledged themselves that he shall have bread, and health, and quietness in return for industry, and simplicity of wants and innocence. The AUTHOR scatters his seed--with aching head, and wasted health, and all the heart-leapings of anxiety; and the follies, the vices, and the fickleness of man promise him printers’ bills and the Debtors’ Side of Newgate as full and sufficient payment.

Charles Lloyd is at Birmingham. I hear from him daily. In his yesterday’s letter he says: “My dearest friend, everything seems clearing around me. My friends enter fully into my views. They seem altogether to have abandoned any ambitious views on my account. My health has been very good since I left you; and I own I look forward with more pleasure than ever to a permanent connection with you. Hitherto I could only look forward to the pleasures of a year. All beyond was dark and uncertain. My father now completely acquiesces in my abandoning the prospect of any profession or trade. If God grant me health, there now remains no obstacle to a completion of my most sanguine wishes.” Charles Lloyd will furnish his own room, and feels it his duty to be in all things his own servant. He will put up a press-bed, so that one room will be his bedchamber and parlour; and I shall settle with him the hours and seasons of our being together, and the hours and seasons of our being apart. But I shall rely on him for nothing except his own maintenance.

As to the poems, they are Cottle’s property, not mine. There is no obstacle from me--no new poems intended to be put in the volume, except the “Visions of the Maid of Orleans.”... But literature, though I shall never abandon it, will always be a secondary object with me. My poetic vanity and my political _furor_ have been exhaled; and I would rather be an expert, self-maintaining gardener than a Milton, if I could not unite both.

My _friend_, wherein I have written impetuously, pardon me! and consider what I have suffered, and still am suffering, in consequence of your letter....

_Finally, my Friend! if your opinion of me and your attachment to me remain unaltered, and if you have assigned the true reasons which urged you to dissuade me from a settlement at Stowey, and if indeed (provided such settlement were consistent with my good and happiness), it would give you unmixed pleasure, I adhere to Stowey, and consider the time from last evening as a distempered dream. But if any circumstances have occurred that have lessened your love or esteem or confidence; or if there be objections to my settling in Stowey on your own account, or any other objections than what you have urged, I doubt not you will declare them openly and unreservedly to me, in your answer to this_, which I shall expect with a total incapability of doing or thinking of anything, till I have received it. Indeed, indeed, I am very miserable. God bless you and your affectionate

S. T. COLERIDGE.

Tuesday, December 13, 1796.

LXVIII. TO JOHN THELWALL.

December 17, 1796.

MY DEAR THELWALL,--I should have written you long ere this, had not the settlement of my affairs previous to my leaving Bristol and the organization of my _new plan_ occupied me with bulky anxieties that almost excluded everything but self from my thoughts. And, besides, my health has been very bad, and remains so. A nervous affection from my right temple to the extremity of my right shoulder almost distracted me, and made the frequent use of laudanum absolutely necessary. And, since I have subdued this, a rheumatic complaint in the back of my head and shoulders, accompanied with sore throat and depression of the animal spirits, has convinced me that a man may change bad lodgers without bettering himself. I write these things, not so much to apologise for my silence, or for the pleasure of complaining, as that you may know the reason why I have not given you a “strict account” how I have disposed of your books. This I will shortly do, with all the veracity which that solemn incantation, “_upon your honour_,” must necessarily have conjured up.

Your second and third part promise great things. I have counted the subjects, and by a nice calculation find that eighteen Scotch doctors would write fifty-four quarto volumes, each choosing his thesis out of your syllabus. May you do good by them, and moreover enable yourself to do more good, I _should_ say, to continue to do good. _My farm_ will be a garden of one acre and a half, in which I mean to raise vegetables and corn enough for myself and wife, and feed a couple of snouted and grunting cousins from the refuse. My evenings I shall devote to literature; and, by reviews, the magazine, and the other shilling-scavenger employments, shall probably gain forty pounds a year; which economy and self-denial, gold-beaters, shall hammer till it cover my annual expenses. Now, in favour of this scheme, I shall say nothing, for the more vehement my ratiocinations were, previous to the experiment, the more ridiculous my failure would appear; and if the scheme deserve the said ratiocinations I shall live down all your objections. I doubt not that the time will come when all our utilities will be directed in one simple path. That time, however, is not come; and imperious circumstances point out to each one his particular road. Much good may be done in all. I am not _fit_ for _public_ life; yet the light shall stream to a far distance from my cottage window. Meantime, _do you_ uplift the _torch_ dreadlessly, and show to mankind the face of that idol which they have worshipped in darkness! And now, my dear fellow, for a little sparring about poetry. My first _sonnet[133] is obscure_; but you ought to distinguish between obscurity residing in the uncommonness of the thought, and that which proceeds from thoughts unconnected and language not adapted to the expression of them. Where you do find out the meaning of my poetry, can you (in general, I mean) alter the language so as to make it more perspicuous--the thought remaining the same? By “dreamy semblance” I _did_ mean semblance of some unknown past, like to a dream, and not “a semblance _presented_ in a dream.” I meant to express that ofttimes, for a second or two, it flashed upon my mind that the then company, conversation, and everything, had occurred before with all the precise circumstances; so as to make reality appear a semblance, and the present like a dream in sleep. Now this thought is obscure; because few persons have experienced the same feeling. Yet several have; and they were proportionably delighted with the lines, as expressing some strange sensations, which they themselves had never ventured to communicate, much less had ever seen developed in poetry. The lines I have altered to,--

Oft o’er my brain does that strange rapture roll
Which makes the present (while its brief fit last)
Seem a mere semblance of some unknown past,
Mixed with such feelings as distress the soul
When dreaming that she dreams.[134]

Next as to “mystical.” Now that the thinking part of man, that is, the soul, existed previously to its appearance in its present body may be very wild philosophy, but it is very intelligible poetry; inasmuch as “soul” is an orthodox word in all our poets, they meaning by “soul” a being inhabiting our body, and playing upon it, like a musician enclosed in an organ whose keys were placed inwards. Now this opinion I do not hold; not that I am a materialist, but because I am a Berkleyan. Yet as you, who are not a Christian, wished you were, that we might meet in heaven, so I, who did not believe in this descending and incarcerated soul, yet said if my baby had died before I had seen him I should have _struggled_ to believe it. Bless me! a commentary of thirty-five lines in defence of a sonnet! and I do not like the sonnet much myself. In some (indeed, in many of my poems) there is a garishness and swell of diction which I hope that my poems in future, if I write any, will be clean of, but seldom, I think, any _conceits_. In the second edition, now printing, I have swept the book with the expurgation-besom to a fine tune, having omitted nearly one third. As to Bowles, I affirm that the manner of his accentuation in the words “brōad dāylīght” (three long syllables) is a beauty, as it admirably expresses the captive’s dwelling on the sight of noon with rapture and a kind of wonder.

The common sun, the air, the skies
To him are opening paradise.
GRAY.

But supposing my defence not tenable; yet how a blunder in metre stamps a man Italian or Della Cruscan I cannot perceive. As to my own poetry, I do confess that it frequently, both in thought and language, deviates from “nature and simplicity.” But that Bowles, the most tender, and, with the exception of Burns, the only _always natural_ in our language, that _he_ should not escape the charge of Della Cruscanism,--this cuts the skin and surface of my heart. “Poetry to have its highest relish must be impassioned.” True. But, firstly, poetry ought not always to have its _highest_ relish; and, secondly, judging of the cause from its effect, poetry, though treating on lofty and abstract truths, ought to be deemed _impassioned_ by him who reads it with impassioned feelings. Now Collins’s “Ode on the Poetical Character,”--that part of it, I should say, beginning with “The band (as faery legends say) Was wove on that creating day,”--has inspired and whirled _me_ along with greater agitations of enthusiasm than any the most _impassioned_ scene in Schiller or Shakespeare, using “impassioned” in its confined sense, for writing in which the human passions of pity, fear, anger, revenge, jealousy, or love are brought into view with their workings. Yet I consider the latter poetry as more valuable, because it gives _more general_ pleasure, and I judge of all things by their utility. I feel strongly and I think strongly, but I seldom feel without thinking or think without feeling. Hence, though my poetry has in general a hue of tenderness or passion over it, yet it seldom exhibits unmixed and simple tenderness or passion. My philosophical opinions are blended with or deduced from my feelings, and this, I think, peculiarises my style of writing, and, like everything else, it is sometimes a beauty and sometimes a fault. But do not let us introduce an Act of Uniformity against Poets. I have room enough in _my_ brain to admire, aye, and almost equally, the _head_ and fancy of Akenside, and the heart and fancy of Bowles, the solemn lordliness of Milton, and the divine chit-chat of Cowper.[135] And whatever a man’s excellence is, that will be likewise his fault.

There were some verses of yours in the last “Monthly Magazine” with which I was much pleased--calm good sense combined with _feeling_, and conveyed in harmonious verse and a chaste and pleasing imagery. I wish much, very much, to see your other poem. As to your Poems which you informed me in the accompanying letter that you had sent in the same parcel with the pamphlets, whether or no your verses had more than their _proper number of feet_ I cannot say; but certain it is, that somehow or other they _marched off_. No “Poems by John Thelwall” could I find. When I charged you with anti-religious bigotry, I did not allude to your pamphlet, but to passages in your letters to me, and to a circumstance which Southey, I _think_, once mentioned, that you had asserted that the name of _God_ ought never to be produced in poetry.[136] Which, to be sure, was carrying hatred _to your Creator very far indeed_.

My dear Thelwall! “It is the principal felicity of life and the chief glory of manhood to speak out fully on all subjects.” I will avail myself of it. I will express _all_ my feelings, but will previously take care to make my feelings benevolent. Contempt is hatred without fear; anger, hatred accompanied with apprehension. But because hatred is always evil, contempt must be always evil, and a good man ought to speak _contemptuously_ of nothing. I am sure a wise man will not of opinions which have been held by men, in _other_ respects at least, confessed of more powerful intellect than himself. ’Tis an assumption of _infallibility_; for if a man were wakefully mindful that what he now thinks foolish he may himself hereafter think wise, it is not in nature that he should _despise_ those who now believe what it is possible he may himself hereafter believe; and if he deny the possibility he must _on that point_ deem himself infallible and immutable. Now, in your letter of yesterday, you speak with _contempt_ of two things: old age and the Christian religion; though religion was believed by Newton, Locke, and Hartley, after intense investigation, which in each had been preceded by unbelief. This does not prove its truth, but it should save its followers from _contempt_, even though through the infirmities of mortality they should have _lost their teeth_. I call that man a bigot, Thelwall, whose intemperate zeal, for or against any opinions, leads him to contradict himself in the space of half a dozen lines. Now this you appear to me to have done. I will write fully to you now, because I shall never renew the subject. I shall not be idle in defence of the religion I profess, and my books will be the place, not my letters. You say the Christian is a _mean_ religion. Now the religion which Christ taught is simply, first, that there is an omnipresent Father of infinite power, wisdom, and goodness, in whom we all of us move and have our being; and, secondly, that when we appear to men to die we do not utterly perish, but after this life shall continue to enjoy or suffer the consequences and natural effects of the habits we have formed here, whether good or evil. This is the Christian _religion_, and all of the Christian _religion_. That there is no _fancy_ in it I readily grant, but that it is mean and deficient in _mind_ and _energy_ it were impossible for me to admit, unless I admitted that there _could be_ no dignity, intellect, or force in anything but _atheism_. But though it appeal not itself to the fancy, the truths which it teaches admit the highest exercise of it. Are the “innumerable multitude of angels and archangels” less splendid beings than the countless gods and goddesses of Rome and Greece? And can you seriously think that Mercury from Jove equals in poetic sublimity “the mighty angel that came down from heaven, whose face was as it were the sun and his feet as pillars of fire: who set his right foot on the sea, and his left foot on the earth. And he sent forth a loud voice; and when he had sent it forth, seven thunders uttered their voices: and when the seven thunders had uttered their voices, the mighty Angel[137] lifted up his hand to heaven, and sware by Him that liveth for ever and ever that _Time_ was no more”? Is not Milton a sublimer poet than Homer or Virgil? Are not his personages more sublimely clothed, and do you not know that there is not perhaps _one page_ in _Milton’s_ Paradise Lost in which he has not borrowed his imagery from the _Scriptures_? I allow and rejoice that _Christ_ appealed only to the understanding and the affections; but I affirm that after reading Isaiah, or St. Paul’s “Epistle to the Hebrews,” Homer and Virgil are disgustingly _tame_ to me, and Milton himself barely tolerable. You and I are very differently organized if you think that the following (putting serious belief out of the question) is a mean flight of impassioned eloquence in which the Apostle marks the difference between the Mosaic and Christian Dispensation: “For ye are not come unto the mount that might be touched” (that is, a material and earthly place) “and that burned with fire, nor unto blackness, and tempest, and the sound of a trumpet, and the voice of words; which voice they that heard entreated that the word should not be spoken to them any more. But ye are come unto Mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, to an innumerable company of angels, to God the Judge of all, and to the spirits of just men made perfect.”[138] _You_ may prefer to all this the quarrels of Jupiter and Juno, the whimpering of wounded Venus, and the jokes of the celestials on the lameness of Vulcan. Be it so (the difference in our tastes it would not be difficult to account for from the different feelings which we have associated with these ideas); I shall continue with Milton to say that

“Zion Hill
Delights me more, and Siloa’s brook that flow’d
Fast by the oracle of God!”

“Visions fit for slobberers!” If infidelity do not lead to sensuality, which in every case except yours I have observed it to do, it always takes away all respect for those who become unpleasant from the infirmities of disease or decaying nature. _Exempli gratiâ_, “the aged are _slobberers_.”[139] The only vision which Christianity holds forth is indeed peculiarly adapted to these _slobberers_. Yes, to these lowly and despised and perishing slobberers it proclaims that their “corruptible shall put on _incorruption_, and their mortal put on _immortality_.”

“Morals to the Magdalen and Botany Bay.” Now, Thelwall, I presume that to preach morals to the virtuous is not quite so requisite as to preach them to the vicious. “The sick need a physician.” Are morals which would make a prostitute a wife and a sister, which would restore her to inward peace and purity; are morals which would make drunkards sober, the ferocious benevolent, and thieves honest, _mean morals_? Is it a despicable trait in our religion, that its professed object is to heal the broken-hearted and give wisdom to the poor man? It preaches _repentance_. What repentance? Tears and sorrow and a repetition of the same crimes? No, a “repentance unto good works;” a repentance that completely does away all superstitious terrors by teaching that the past is nothing in itself, that, if the mind _is_ good, that it _was_ bad imports nothing. “It is a religion for democrats.” It certainly teaches in the most explicit terms the rights of man, his right to wisdom, his right to an equal share in all the blessings of nature; it commands its disciples to go everywhere, and everywhere to preach these rights; it commands them never to use the arm of flesh, to be perfectly non-resistant; yet to hold the promulgation of _truth_ to be a law above law, and in the performance of this office to defy “wickedness in high places,” and cheerfully to endure ignominy, and wretchedness, and torments, and death, rather than _intermit_ the performance of it; yet, while enduring ignominy, and wretchedness, and torments, and death, to feel nothing but sorrow, and pity, and love for those who inflicted them; wishing their oppressors to be altogether such as they, “excepting these bonds.” Here is _truth_ in theory and in practice, a union of energetic _action_ and more energetic _suffering_. For activity amuses; but he who can _endure_ calmly must possess the seeds of true greatness. For all his animal spirits will of necessity fail him; and he has only his mind to trust to. These doubtless are morals for all the lovers of mankind, who wish to _act_ as well as _speculate_; and that you should allow this, and yet, not three lines before call the same _morals mean_, appears to me a gross self-contradiction symptomatic of bigotry. I write freely, Thelwall; for, though _personally_ unknown, I really love you, and can count but few human beings whose hand I would welcome with a more hearty grasp of friendship. I suspect, Thelwall, that you never read your Testament, since your understanding was matured, without carelessness, and previous contempt, and a somewhat like hatred. Christianity regards morality as a process. It finds a man vicious and unsusceptible of noble motives and gradually leads him, at least desires to lead him, to the height of disinterested virtue; till, in relation and proportion to his faculties and power, he is perfect “even as our Father in heaven is perfect.” There is no resting-place for morality. Now I will make one other appeal, and have done forever with the subject. There is a passage in Scripture which comprises the whole process, and each component part, of Christian morals. Previously let me explain the word faith. By faith I understand, first, a deduction from experiments in favour of the existence of something not experienced, and, secondly, the motives which attend such a deduction. Now motives, being selfish, are only the beginning and the _foundation_, necessary and of first-rate importance, yet made of vile materials, and hidden beneath the splendid superstructure.

“Now giving all diligence, add to your faith _fortitude_, and to _fortitude knowledge_, and to knowledge purity, and to purity patience,[140] and to patience godliness,[141] and to godliness brotherly-kindness, and to brotherly-kindness universal love.”[142]

I hope, whatever you may think of godliness, you will like the _note_ on it. I need not tell you, that godliness is God-_like_ness, and is paraphrased by Peter “that ye may be partakers of the divine nature,” that is, act from a love of order and happiness, not from any self-respecting motive; from the excellency into which you have exalted your _nature_, not from the _keenness_ of mere _prudence_. “Add to your faith fortitude, and to fortitude knowledge, and to knowledge purity, and to purity patience, and to patience godliness, and to godliness brotherly-kindness, and to brotherly-kindness universal love.” Now, Thelwall, putting _faith_ out of the question (which, by the bye, is not mentioned as a virtue, but as the leader to them), can you mention a virtue which is not here enjoined? and supposing the precepts embodied in the practice of any one human being, would not perfection be personified? I write these things not with any expectation of making you a Christian. I should smile at my own folly, if I conceived it even in a friendly day-dream.

* * * * *

“The ardour of undisciplined benevolence seduces us into malignity,” and, while you accustom yourself to speak so _contemptuously_ of doctrines you do not accede to, and persons with whom you do not accord, I must doubt whether even your _brotherly-kindness_ might not be made more perfect. That is surely _fit_ for a man which his mind after sincere examination approves, which animates his conduct, soothes his sorrows, and heightens his pleasures. Every good and earnest Christian declares that all this is true of the _visions_ (as you please to style them, God knows why) of Christianity. Every earnest Christian, therefore, is on a level with slobberers. Do not charge me with dwelling on one expression. These expressions are always indicative of the habit of feeling. You possess fortitude and purity, and a large portion of brotherly-kindness and universal love; drink with unquenchable thirst of the two latter virtues, and acquire _patience_; and then, Thelwall, should _your_ system be true, all that can be said is that (if both our systems should be found to increase our own and our fellow-creatures’ happiness), “Here lie and did lie the _all_ of John Thelwall and S. T. Coleridge. They were both humane, and happy, but the former was the more knowing;” and if my system should prove true, we, I doubt not, shall both meet in the kingdom of heaven, and I, with transport in my eye, shall say, “I _told_ you so, my _dear_ fellow.” But seriously, the faulty habit of feeling, which I have endeavoured to point out in you, I have detected in at least as great degree in my own practice, and am struggling to subdue it. I rejoice that the bankrupt honesty of the public has paid even the small dividend you mentioned. As to your second part, I will write you about it in a day or two, when I give you an account how I have disposed of your first. My dear little baby! and my wife thinks that he already begins to flutter the callow wings of his intellect. Oh, the wise heart and foolish head of a mother! Kiss your little girl for me, and tell her if I knew her I would love her; and then I hope in your next letter you will convey _her love_ to me and my Sara. Your dear boy, I trust, will return with rosy cheeks. Don’t you suspect, Thelwall, that the little atheist Madam Stella has an abominable _Christian_ kind of _heart_? My Sara is much interested about her; and I should not wonder if they were to be sworn sister-seraphs in the heavenly Jerusalem. Give my love to her.

I have sent you some loose sheets which Charles Lloyd and I printed together, intending to make a volume, but I gave it up and cancelled them.[143] Item, Joan of Arc, with only the passage of my writing cut out for the printers, as I am printing it in my second edition, with very great alterations and an addition of four hundred lines, so as to make it a complete and independent poem, entitled, “The Progress of Liberty,” or “The Visions of the Maid of Orleans.” Item, a sheet of sonnets[144] collected by me for the use of a few friends, who paid the printing. There you will see my opinion of sonnets. Item, Poem by C. Lloyd[145] on the death of one of your “slobberers,” a very venerable old lady, and a Quaker. The book is dressed like a rich Quaker, in costly raiment but unornamented. The loss of her almost killed my poor young friend; for he doted on her from his infancy. Item, a poem of mine on Burns[146] which was printed to be dispersed among friends. It was addressed to Charles Lamb. Item, (Shall I give it thee, blasphemer? No! I won’t, but) to thy Stella I do present the poems of my youth for a keepsake. Of this parcel I do entreat thy acceptance. I have another Joan of Arc, so you have a _right_ to the one enclosed. Postscript. Item, a humorous “Droll” on S. Ireland, of which I have likewise another. Item, a strange poem written by an astrologer here, who _was_ a man of fine genius, which, at intervals, he still discovers. But, ah me! Madness smote with her hand and stamped with her feet and swore that he should be hers, and hers he is. He is a man of fluent eloquence and general knowledge, gentle in his manners, warm in his affections; but unfortunately he has received a few rays of supernatural light through a crack in his upper story. I _express_ myself unfeelingly; but indeed my heart always aches when I think of him. Item, some verses of Robert Southey to a college cat.[147] And, finally, the following lines by thy affectionate friend,

S. T. COLERIDGE.

TO A YOUNG MAN

WHO ABANDONED HIMSELF TO A CAUSELESS AND INDOLENT MELANCHOLY.[148]

Hence that fantastic wantonness of woe,
O youth to partial Fortune vainly dear!
To plunder’d Want’s half-sheltered hovel go,
Go, and some hunger-bitten infant hear
Moan haply in a dying mother’s ear.

Or seek some _widow’s_ grave; whose dearer part
Was slaughtered, where o’er his uncoffin’d limbs
The flocking flesh-birds scream’d! Then, while thy heart
Groans, and thine eyes a fiercer sorrow dims,
Know (and the truth shall kindle thy young mind),
What Nature makes thee mourn she bids thee heal.
O abject! if, to sickly dreams resign’d,
All effortless thou leave Earth’s common weal
A prey to the thron’d Murderess of Mankind!

After the first five lines these two followed:--

Or when the cold and dismal fog-damps brood
O’er the rank church-yard with sere elm-leaves strew’d,
Pace round some _widow’s_ grave, etc.

These they rightly omitted. I love sonnets; but _upon my honour_ I do not love _my_ sonnets.

N. B.--Direct your letters, S. T. Coleridge, Mr. Cottle’s, High Street, Bristol.

LXIX. TO THOMAS POOLE.

Sunday morning [? December 18, 1796.]

MY DEAR POOLE,--I wrote to you with improper impetuosity; but I had been dwelling so long on the circumstance of living near you, that my mind was thrown by your letter into the feelings of those distressful dreams[149] where we imagine ourselves falling from precipices. I seemed falling from the summit of my fondest desires, whirled from the height just as I had reached it.

We shall want none of the Woman’s furniture; we have enough for ourselves. What with boxes of books, and chests of drawers, and kitchen furniture, and chairs, and our bed and bed-linen, etc., we shall have enough to fill a small waggon, and to-day I shall make enquiry among my trading acquaintance, whether it would be cheaper to hire a waggon to take them straight to Stowey, than to put them in the Bridgwater waggon. Taking in the double trouble and expense of putting them in the drays to carry them to the public waggon, and then seeing them packed again, and again to be unpacked and packed at Bridgwater, I much question whether our goods would be good for anything. I am very poorly, not to say ill. My face monstrously swollen--my recondite eye sits distent quaintly, behind the flesh-hill, and looks as little as a tomtit’s. And I have a sore throat that prevents my eating aught but spoon-meat without great pain. And I have a rheumatic complaint in the back part of my head and shoulders. Now all this demands a small portion of Christian patience, taking in our present circumstances. My apothecary says it will be madness for me to walk to Stowey on Tuesday, as, in the furious zeal of a new convert to economy, I had resolved to do. My wife will stay a week or fortnight after me; I think it not improbable that the weather may break up by that time. However, if I do not get worse, I will be with you by Wednesday or Thursday at the furthest, so as to be there before the waggon. Is there any grate in the house? I should think we might Rumfordize one of the chimneys. I shall bring down with me a dozen yards of green list. I can endure cold, but not a cold room. If we can but contrive to make two rooms _warm_ and _wholesome_, we will laugh in the faces of gloom and ill-lookingness.

I shall lose the post if I say a word more. You thoroughly and in every nook and corner of your heart forgive me for my letters? Indeed, indeed, Poole, I know no one whom I esteem more--no one friend whom I love so much. But bear with my infirmities! God bless you, and your grateful and affectionate

S. T. COLERIDGE.

LXX. TO JOHN THELWALL.

December 31, 1796.

Enough, my dear Thelwall, of theology. In my book on Godwin, I compare the two systems, his and Jesus’, and that book I am sure you will read with attention. I entirely accord with your opinion of Southey’s “Joan.” The ninth book is execrable, and the poem, though it frequently reach the _sentimental_, does not display the _poetical-sublime_. In language at once natural, perspicuous, and dignified in manly pathos, in soothing and sonnet-like description, and, above all, in character and _dramatic_ dialogue, Southey is unrivalled; but as certainly he does not possess opulence of imaginative lofty-paced harmony, or that toil of thinking which is necessary in order to plan a _whole_. Dismissing mock humility, and hanging your mind as a looking-glass over my idea-pot, so as to image on the said mind all the bubbles that boil in the said idea-pot (there’s a damned long-winded metaphor for you), I think that an admirable poet might be made by _amalgamating him_ and _me_. I _think_ too much for a _poet_, he too little for a _great_ poet. But he abjures _feeling_. Now (as you say) they must go together. Between ourselves the _enthusiasm_ of friendship is not with S. and me. We quarrelled and the quarrel lasted for a twelvemonth. We are now reconciled; but the cause of the difference was solemn, and “the blasted oak puts not forth its buds anew.” We are _acquaintances_, and feel _kindliness_ towards each other, but I do not _esteem_ or _love_ Southey, as I must esteem and love the man whom I dared call by the holy name of _friend_: and vice versâ Southey of me. I say no more. It is a painful subject, and do you say nothing. I mention this for obvious reasons, but let it go no farther. It is a painful subject. Southey’s direction at present is R. Southey, No. 8 West-gate Buildings, Bath, but he leaves Bath for London in the course of a week. You imagine that I know Bowles personally. I never saw him but once, and when I was a boy and in Salisbury market-place.

The passage in your letter respecting your mother affected me greatly. Well, true or false, heaven is a less gloomy idea than annihilation. Dr. Beddoes and Dr. Darwin think that _Life_ is utterly inexplicable, writing as materialists. You, I understand, have adopted the idea that it is the result of organised matter acted on by external stimuli. As likely as any other system, but you assume the thing to be proved. The “capability of being stimulated into sensation” ... is my definition of _animal life_. Monro believes in a plastic, immaterial nature, all-pervading.

And what if all of animated nature
Be but organic harps diversely framed,
That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps
Plastic and vast, etc.

(By the bye, that is the favourite of _my_ poems; do you like it?) Hunter says that the _blood_ is the life, which is saying nothing at all; for, if the blood were _life_, it could never be otherwise than life, and to say it is _alive_ is saying nothing; and Ferriar believes in a _soul_, like an orthodox churchman. So much for physicians and surgeons! Now as to the metaphysicians. Plato says it is _harmony_. He might as well have said a fiddlestick’s end; but I love Plato, his dear, _gorgeous_ nonsense; and I, _though last not least_, _I_ do not know what to think about it. On the whole, I have rather made up my mind that I am a mere _apparition_, a naked spirit, and that life is, I myself I; which is a mighty clear account of it. Now I have written all this, not to express my ignorance (that is an accidental effect, not the final cause), but to shew you that I want to see your essay on “Animal Vitality,” of which Bowles the surgeon spoke in high terms. Yet _he_ believes in a _body_ and a _soul_. Any book may be left at Robinson’s for _me_, “to be put into the next parcel, to be sent to ‘Joseph Cottle, bookseller, Bristol.’” Have you received an “Ode”[150] of mine from Parsons? In your next letter tell me what you think of the _scattered_ poems I sent you. Send me any poems, and I will be minute in criticism. For, O Thelwall, even a long-winded abuse is more consolatory to an _author’s_ feelings than a short-breathed, asthma-lunged panegyric. Joking apart, I would to God we could sit by a fireside and joke _vivâ voce_, face to face--Stella and Sara, Jack Thelwall and I. As I once wrote to my dear friend, T. Poole, “repeating--

‘Such verse as Bowles, heart-honour’d poet, sang,
That wakes the Tear, yet steals away the Pang,
Then, or with Berkeley or with Hobbes romance it,
Dissecting Truth with metaphysic lancet.
Or, drawn from up those dark unfathom’d wells,
In wiser folly clink the Cap and Bells.
How many tales we told! what jokes we made!
Conundrum, Crambo, Rebus, or Charade;
Ænigmas that had driven the Theban[151] mad,
And Puns, then best when exquisitely bad;
And I, if aught of archer vein I hit
With my own laughter stifled my own wit.’”[152]

CHAPTER III

THE STOWEY PERIOD

1797-1798